


A Fair Judgment

by Camelittle



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: An Intervention, Angst, Canon Compliant, Dragons, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Gwen & Merlin Friendship (Merlin), Healing, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Past Gwen/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin), Past Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) - Freeform, Piercings, Platonic Relationships, Post-Canon, Queen Gwen (Merlin), Quests, Reconciliation, after camlann, bodyguards, haunted, life goes on - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:08:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22677706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Camelittle/pseuds/Camelittle
Summary: Many months after Camlann, Gwen goes in search of Merlin. Hearing a rumour of a haunted cliff away in the far north of Albion, beyond the wall, she follows her instinct to investigate, taking only her trusted bodyguards, Percival and Leon, as her companions.
Relationships: Gwen & Merlin (Merlin)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 87
Collections: Hurt/Comfort Bingo - Round 10





	A Fair Judgment

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my h/c bingo February 2019 amnesty challenge: Prompts Needles/Piercings, bodyguards, haunted, wild card (grief). With huge thanks to Tari_Sue and Clea2011 for reading despite it being far from fluffy! I promise my next one will have ALL THE FLUFFS! 
> 
> Warning for earlier off-screen canon major character death (ok we all know what I'm talking about because WE WILL NEVER GET OVER IT).

Far away in the deep north of Albion, three still figures stood before a gash in the haunted cliff. Around them the white dragon raged. It dipped and feinted and roared. Fire gushed from its gaping mouth. But for all its ferocity, for all the heat that made the air crackle and for all the branches that smouldered on the soot-blackened rock, for all the far-off, terrified cries of the horses as they fled, not one of the humans was harmed. 

“Well, if we had any doubt that we would find him here,” said the Queen. The smallest of the three, she stood in the centre, a diminutive figure flanked by her two hulking giants of bodyguards. “Then the presence of the white dragon gives it away. I’m sure this is the one that we saw at the battle. The one that Merlin bade leave. And fly away it did. He is here, I am sure of it.” 

“Haunted, they said this place was.” Percival faced the beast, sword raised. It alighted ten paces away, blocking the rough track that led up to the cliff, roared at them, and then surged back up, wings beating high. “Not guarded by a mad dragon.” 

“I do not believe it to be haunted, Percival. Nor do I believe the dragon mad. Stop that,” said Gwen, raising her voice to the dragon. She stamped her foot. “That is enough!” 

“Take care, my lady…” said Leon. “Is it wise to antagonise such a beast any further?” 

But despite Leon’s misgivings, the beast retreated another ten paces. It let out an annoyed-sounding huff, which forced smoke out through its nostrils, and tilted its head on one side.

Gwen pointed. “See? The creature listens.” 

Sure enough, as if bidden by some unseen command, the dragon let off one final, terror-inducing roar before it flew off to settle atop the cliff, preening its leathery wings with its vast, terrible muzzle. 

Into the sudden silence, a quiet yet unmistakable voice spoke. “You’d better come on up.” 

Its owner stepped out of the cave into the sunlight, shielding his eyes. 

“Merlin! It is you! I knew it!” Despite her earlier projected confidence, Gwen couldn’t help letting out a sigh of relief at being correct about just who or what had been haunting these wild northlands. It had taken weeks to convince the council to let her investigate in person. It would have been humiliating and difficult if to explain that she was wrong. 

“Be careful, my lady,” said Leon, stolid and steadfast as ever, and still uneasy with magical creatures and magicians of any kind. “You saw what he was capable of, at Camlann.”

“Oh shut up, Leon. It’s Merlin! As if he would ever let any harm come to me! Now, make yourselves useful and go and find the horses. Merlin and I need to talk.”

“But—” 

“No buts. Merlin will look after me.” She picked up her skirts and ran up the track, hopping over stray brambles as she ran, light-footed and glad of heart.

For it was indeed Merlin who stood before her, head bowed. When she stopped in front of him, he knelt at her feet, as if awaiting judgment. The bones in his spine made a line of mounds beneath the tattered fabric of his tunic. His hair bushed out around his head in a mane of black, matted curls. 

A great stab of pity surged through her then, to see this great man, her dearest friend, reduced to such a thin, pained figure with so little care for his own health and wellbeing. 

“Oh, get up, Merlin.” She placed one hand to the side of his head, gentling it as if he were a pet. “Please. Don’t kneel. After all you have done for this kingdom, you of all people deserve to stand proud before me.” 

He struggled to his feet then, still unsmiling, looking down at the floor, too thin, his clothes hanging from his wasting frame. “Gwen. You look well.” 

“I wish I could say the same about you.” She reached up with one hand to catch at his arm. 

His clothes were torn, with patches of pale skin poking through here and there. Blue paint adorned his face, and through the lobes of his still prominent ears now poked ugly bone piercings, pale and jagged. 

“Oh, Merlin,” she said, heart aching with pity and fellow-feeling. “What have you done to yourself? Why are you here?” 

He shrugged, head still down, hands clasping and unclasping nervously. “I wished to learn from the Picts… Pictish magic.” 

She snorted. “Pictish magic? Is that why you’ve got bones in your ears?” 

“They’re not bones. They’re teeth. Dragon teeth. Aithusa… she needed me.” 

“Aithusa?”

“The dragon.” He gestured towards the creature. “My friend. She was broken, and… it was my fault. I’m a dragonlord, Gwen. I should have looked after her… it’s my fault that she ended up being captured and hurt. She was but a hatchling, and I left her alone… I failed her, as I failed us all, and I will never forgive myself for that.”

A dragonlord? Gwen was past being surprised about all Merlin’s hidden talents and secrets by now. She would follow up on that later. For now, it was Merlin’s deepest and most hurtful secret that needed probing, and he was still talking, so she did not interrupt. 

“And she…” Merlin bit his lip. “And I… I needed… I needed someone, something to need me. Now that I didn’t… now that _he_ doesn’t _…”_

Gwen did not need to ask who _he_ was. She could read it in the tense line of Merlin’s shoulders, hear it in every tremor and stutter of his speech.

“Now that he is lost… now that.” He swallowed and stared up at the sky. “Now that he is _gone_. What else was I to do? Why was I alive, and not him? It made no sense. I couldn’t… I needed…” he trailed off, throat working. 

Poor Merlin. With all his single minded purpose so focused on Arthur for so many years, she supposed that it was only logical that he would feel rudderless without him. 

“You are not fooling me.” She tried to inject humour into her voice, but it came out more like resentment. “You just wanted to run away from Camelot. From the people who loved you, and who love you still.” 

_From me_ , she wanted to add. 

“No, no. It wasn’t that.” His gaze darted off into the trees, up to the cliff and the dozing dragon, away towards Percival and Leon, anywhere but at Gwen. “Aithusa needs me! I have a duty of care to her, now that she is the only one left of her kind.” 

He left the implication – that he, too, was now alone – unspoken, but she addressed it anyway. By drawing his trembling body into a warm embrace. 

“But that does not explain why you went so far away, Merlin.” She rubbed his back as if trying to draw away the tension there. “Nor why you never sent word.”

“I don’t… because…” He let out a pained gasp. “I…” 

She did not interrupt, merely waited. 

“Because… because… All right. I’ll say it because. Because it’s true. I…” 

He shook his head, gulping in a great breath that made his shoulders heave in her arms. 

“I loved him.” Finally he looked at her, his jaw straight with this bald declaration, defiant and reckless with his truth, his voice fervent and filled with such grief that Gwen could weep. “Arthur, I mean. I loved him. Beyond all reason, all logic. He… He was my sun and my moon and my sky. He was my everything.” 

And there it was. The truth that she sought. Clouds did not obscure the sun at this revelation, and the birds did not fall from the trees. No thunder rent the air, no hailstones fell. Instead, a gentle breeze whispered in the leaves and a far-off buzzard wheeled, black against the overarching blue. The truth that had always lain unspoken between them was out in the open, and they could both be free of it.

“And now… now he is gone, and I am nothing. I failed. I failed, Gwen, and I’m sorry.”

“Do you think that we don’t miss him, too?” She whispered, her throat closing against the sudden surge of grief. “That _I_ don’t miss him? I loved him too, Merlin. He was my _husband_!” 

He flinched from the word as if it were a blow, pulling back from her with a hiss, then pressing his lips together as if fearful of what he might blurt out next. 

“And so you loved him, what of it? Who didn’t? It doesn’t matter, Merlin. Don’t you see? Because you belong in Camelot. It’s your home. Come home!” she pleaded. “Please. Let us care for you. It grieves me to see you like this. You should be housed with the people who love you, in all honour and comfort…”

“No.” He broke fully apart from her, holding her at arm’s length, and shook his head, eyes glistening with unshed tears. “You don’t understand! I made mistakes. I failed. I failed my king, and I failed you. Camelot cannot be my home. Not any more. Not now. Not without him. I’m sorry, Gwen. I can’t walk through those passageways, past the door to his chambers, every step would remind me of him, of my failure, of him dying in my arms… I just…” He swallowed and looked away. In the pitiless light of the sun, she could see every freckle on his face, the lines that had sprung up around his eyes and mouth. “I just can’t.”

“Fine,” she whispered, drawing her hands along his arms until they reached his wrists, then his hands, which she clasped between hers, massaging them with her thumbs. “It shall be as you wish. We shall not force you to come home with us against your will. My dear, dear friend. But please…” Tears started in her eyes then at the thought of leaving him here like this. “Please, I beg you. Please promise me you will take care of yourself. Don’t let yourself fade away. And the dragon that has become your companion, does he—?”

“She.” 

“She, then. Does she not deserve a mentor who can be strong for her? Teach her self care and kindness as well as restraint and discipline? Someone who will fight for themselves, for her, and take all the grief that life will throw at her, and like a phoenix, emerge from it, different but stronger?” 

He bit his lip and glanced up at the cliff where the dragon sat, scratching her gnarled head with a clawed forepaw. 

Sensing that she had hit a nerve, Gwen pressed on with this line of argument. “And does she not deserve a role model who practices those things? Hmm?” 

“But--”

“No buts, Merlin.” She shook her head and summoned up all the reserves of queenly command at her disposal. “I judge that if you carry on like this you… you will fail her again. You are failing her now.” 

His lips parted. Inhaling sharply, he turned stricken eyes on her. 

“It is true. This… this moping and self pity will not help you, nor will it help her. I am glad that you have found a sense of purpose here. And I am glad that the two of you have each other. And I’m glad, yes I’m glad, that you loved my husband, and in ways that I could not. You think I did not know that? You think that I did not know that he loved you too?” 

He bit his lip. 

“But this…” she swept a dismissive hand the length of his emaciated body. “This self flagellation… it does not help anybody.” 

He looked away. 

“Look at me, Merlin.” 

His eyes flickered.

“I said look at me!” She gazed into his face, drawing his jaw towards her, willing him to turn his attention back to her and away from whatever self pitying place it had gone to. “I command you! You are still a citizen of Camelot, and I command you, in the name of the man that we both loved, to look at me.” 

Although he flinched, he did as she commanded. His eyes were flinty and hard, but after a moment or two they softened and he blinked, mouth wavering. 

“Gwen?” he whispered. 

“Do you see me now? I am the Queen. But before that, before you and I ever loved anybody, I was your friend. I am still. And you are my citizen. My responsibility, Merlin!” her voice trembled. “ _I_ have a duty of care to _you_. I have travelled the length of this land, with only my two most trusted bodyguards by my side, to find you. And I will not be gainsaid.” 

Finally a ghost of a smile played at his lips, which twitched, making the shaggy black hairs of his beard splay out in a rueful fan around his mouth. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re quite scary when you’re bossy?”

“So Arthur used to say.” She smiled back.

His face fell again when she mentioned Arthur’s name, but he did not flinch or try to break away from her hold on his hands again, which she counted as a victory. 

“You must remember him,” she said. “Speak his name. Shout it out loud! Even though it hurts. Honour his memory. He shone bright, brighter than any who have come before him and anyone who will follow. I will not tell you not to weep, for he deserves your tears. But do not allow your grief to break you, Merlin. Do not stain his memory in that way. He loved you too much to let you waste away like this.” 

His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down when he swallowed, and tears flowed freely down his cheeks, but he nodded and returned her unflinching gaze.

“Think about what he would have wanted… for you… for Camelot” 

He nodded again, peeping at her between his lashes. 

Promise?” she added. 

“I promise,” he whispered back. 

“Good.” Finally letting herself relax, she stepped back, weariness from their epic journey seeping into her bones. She contemplated their return to Camelot with a sigh, and her shoulders slumped. “I suppose we must return now.” 

Three perilous weeks they had travelled to get here. The roads of Albion were not as dangerous as they once had been – and the prosperity that followed the battle was already beginning to rid the forests of the bandits and kidnappers and ghoulish slave traders that had once infested the lands. But she was but a woman, one recently widowed at that, and had fought many a mental and metaphorical battle with Albion’s more stubborn lords and villagers and minor barons and power-hungry second sons along their way. The thought of what awaited her on the return journey made her weary indeed. 

Above all, she was missing her husband. The man who had ruled at her side, with justice and honesty, whose example she strove to follow, and who had supported her with such faith in her and such steadfastness throughout their reign together. 

For a moment, while her bodyguards cast about in the forests for their missing steeds, and her oldest friend stood before her, batting tears from his own eyes after confessing his love for her dead husband, she allowed herself a moment of luxury. In this moment, she fantasised that she was already relaxing in her bath back in Camelot, air rich with the scent of herbs, her maid’s kind hands upon her skin and a soft, velvety night-gown awaiting her…

“My lady?” 

Fantasy broken, she opened her eyes, to find Merlin staring down at her with a smile. A hint of his characteristic focus and energy, earlier missing, had returned to his eyes. 

“I’m so sorry, dear Gwen,” he whispered, shaking his head and looking her up and down. With one gentle hand, he tucked a stray curl behind her ear. “I’ve been so selfish. You have come such a long way, just for me. You came for me, and you did me the honour of speaking to me, and listening. I am so thankful, and so sorry for my selfishness, my Queen. My true friend.” 

She bit her lip, and blinked back tears, suddenly drained from their discussion, and uncertain that she could even climb upon a horse today. 

“I have been remiss, Gwen, my dearest and oldest friend. You have travelled far, and must be sore and wishing for your comforts.” He bowed deep and low, voice strengthening. “Forgive me for greeting you in my reduced and sorry state. Allow me to make amends.” 

He closed his eyes and breathed in. As he exhaled, he spread his hands out, gesturing towards the heavens. His eyes flashed open and glowed golden like the setting rays of the sun. In the moment between one breath and the next, he was transformed; his hair groomed, beard neatly trimmed, clothing restored to the comfortable peasant garments that he used to wear in Camelot. But the dragons’ teeth piercings remained in his earlobes, a reminder of the man he had become.

He gestured towards the mouth of the cave, beckoning. 

“Come, my dear Queen. Rest in my palace, and be welcome. I will help the others with the horses.” 

Curious, she peeped around the dragon-scorched bracken fronds that masked the cave entrance, and gasped. For inside lay a comfortable space, lined with rich wall hangings, floored with clean straw, and adorned here and there by crude yet elegant paintings of wild animals and magical beasts of every variety. A merry fire crackled and hissed at its heart, the smoke drawn high up through the cracks and fissures in the rock, leaving the air in the cave warm and dry. The space was dimly lit by an array of glowing blue orbs whose light spun and sparkled with an inner warmth. 

Deeper inside the cave, a table groaned with cold meats, seasonal fruit and cheeses.

She walked slowly up to this feast, mouth watering, while outside Merlin called to Percival and Leon, and she heard snips of conversation while they gathered the horses and led them to where they could rest away free from their fear of the dragon. 

And after they returned, and ate together, toasting each other’s health and the memory of the departed, they curled up on cots lined with springy straw and furs where she slept, content and able to relax for the first time in months. 

They rested there for some days, restoring their long friendship with walks, conversations and companionable silences, before a change in the weather reminded her that she needed to return and see to the affairs of her kingdom. But before they had to bid one another farewell, she and Merlin sat up on the high cliff with the dragon, Aithusa, and gazed out over the shimmering sunlit lands together for one final time. 

“I will come back, one day. To Camelot.” Merlin clasped her hand and turned blue eyes on her. They were less sunken than they had been, although still haunted by sorrow and past trauma. “I promise. And I thank you. For waking me up, for forcing me to see you. For finding me, in this remote place. I am more grateful than I can ever say.” 

“I’m sorry,” she said, although she was not. “For judging you so harshly.” 

“It was a fair judgment,” he replied with a smile that finally touched his eyes. 


End file.
